Damien’s rocketry captain aims high, won’t be boxed in

As captain of the school rocketry team, junior homecoming queen and precocious member of the first cohort of young women to graduate from Damien Memorial School, Emily Burke is perfectly comfortable charting her own course to success.

“I’ve never let people put me in a box,” Burke said. “When people get to know me, they understand that I’m not one to let other people define me.”

This is not mere teenage posturing.

A military child, Burke was born in Alaska and lived in Arizona, Georgia and Missouri before landing in Hawaii four years ago.

From an early age she demonstrated the sort of natural curiosity from which great scientific minds have developed. More important, she displayed the tenacity and willingness to perform the hard work of scientific inquiry, often “bingeing” on topics and areas that stimulated her intellectual appetites, from ancient Egypt and Greece to marine biology (especially sharks) to geology.

Like many young women of her generation who have strode confidently into what used to be exclusively male halls of math and science, Burke has pursued her personal and academic interests through Damien’s robotics and rocketry clubs, as well as the school’s speech and debate programs. She’s also attended numerous summer science camps.

Burke and her rocketry team colleagues have been conducting launches at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in hopes of qualifying for the prestigious Team America Rocketry Challenge in Virginia this spring. Already, Burke has earned the respect of Jacob Hudson, the notoriously tough team adviser who teaches physics at Damien and serves as coordinator of the NASA Aerospace Education Laboratory at Windward Community College.

Burke said her studies have deepened the way she sees the world.

“Especially with physics, I see it all around me,” she said. “When I’m bored, I’ll see something and work out simple problems for me to solve.”

A junior by standing, Burke has already earned enough credits to graduate this spring as part of the first class to advance to graduation since the school went coed in 2012.

What happens next is still uncertain. Burke has applied to several schools, including Michigan Technological University and Dartmouth, and will decide on a destination when all the responses are in. She intends to pursue a career in a science-related field, although which one has yet to be determined.

What is sure is that she will continue to develop her abilities according to her own unique vision.

“When I look at something, I try to look at it in a way that it hasn’t been looked at before.”

Check out Burke and the rest of the Damien rocketry team here (Burke speaking at 2:12): 808ne.ws/20l85vr.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.